A major objective in securities market analysis is to capture huge amounts of data that has a short lifespan. Investors need to make critical decisions, many times in extremely short time spans by scouring through the multitude of market and individual stock indicators. In this landscape, visualization techniques have become important tools for investors and market analysts alike.
One of the earliest and innovative visualization tools introduced to the market, which has become popular in the industry is the Map of the Market™ described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,583,994 issued to Martin Wattenberg. The interface system, in accordance with the patent, provides a visual display of a financial market with a display of the financial sectors, and stocks represented as rectangles, where the size and background color of each rectangle on the display represents the market capitalization and performance of the sector for a defined period of time. The size of each rectangle is optimized to be as close as possible to a square. Various display layers allow the user to visualize a group of companies within a sector, where each company is also represented by a square with a size and background color corresponding to the market cap and performance. Such sector analysis has led to a widespread use of proportional maps also known as tree maps.
Another market visualization tool has been described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,972,295 issued to Johnson et. al. The patent teaches arrangements for interactively displaying large set of financial data on devices with limited size display screens such as smartphones or tablets. In one embodiment, the patent describes arranging the location of displayed items in a spiral format, with the largest companies spiraling out from the center of the display. As such, rather than size of the tile representing the market cap, as discussed in the '994 patent, the '295 patent enables the user to determine the size of the company based on its location on the spiral arrangement.
Although the above advances in visualizing market performance have been the right steps towards visual analytics, there is a need for a system that allows various interactive graphical representations of market data that allows the user to make a selection of available indicators and perform a cross analysis based on the selected indicators.